Building Confidence

When you say to yourself with total conviction, "I can alter my life, by altering the attitude of my mind," you have started on the path to confidence.

For an athlete to perform well it is crucial for them to feel confident.  You may be the strongest, tallest, most powerful athlete on the field, but if you aren’t confident in your abilities, you’ll have trouble reaching your goals. Athletes need to work on improving their confidence just as they work on developing sport-specific skills.  Improve your confidence and your performance will soar.

How can you increase your confidence?

First off it is important to realize that confidence fluctuates. Confidence for all athletes — even at the highest level — ebbs and flows. Confidence is not all-or-nothing. It’s a state of mind that goes up and down, so don’t beat yourself up when your confidence is lower. Just focus on improving, and your confidence will follow suit.

Secondly, focus on yourself, not on others. Instead of thinking about how well your teammates or opponents are doing, think about your own performance and how you can improve. This is your athletic career, so you need to focus on what you need to do to improve as an athlete. And when you improve as an athlete, your confidence will increase.

Thirdly, focus on day-to-day success. When you have success every day in training — even the smallest of successes — your confidence rises. If your confidence rises a small amount each day, just think where you’ll be in one month, six months, or a year!

Fourthly, concentrate on the process, not outcomes just as we do when setting goals for training and skill development.  When you focus on improving your performance — the process of improving — you become more confident because you’re focusing on something you have control over. You can’t control outcomes — you may play your best game ever and still lose. If you focus on process you may still be disappointed if you lose, but your confidence will remain high because you will know you performed your best.

Fifthly, focus on what you’re doing right. Learning from your mistakes is important, but you don’t want to fixate on them. If you spend too much time thinking about your mistakes, your confidence will wane. When you focus on what you’re doing right and correct your errors, your confidence will rise.



~H